Wayfaring Stranger
by OnceUponASomeday
Summary: A fix, of sorts, for season 5 and the trauma inflicted by it. Not AU, but an alternative, if you wish to see it that way. Rayna Jaymes lives on.


This one is a bit different and a bit random perhaps. It's something I wrote a while ago as a wish for the series finale/how I envisioned a realistic way to bring Rayna back and erase the damage done. It takes a bit of a leap of the imagination I suppose but is that not what it takes to believe any fiction, really?

Might be a little confusing and I thought about expanding it to try to make it more of a fleshed out story, but it was intended to visualise how the finale episode could have played out so it's broken up into scenes, of sorts, rather than narrative. It picks up from early season 5 with Rayna driving back from Silicon Valley, and assumes that everything that came next in the show didn't happen/was a continuation of her imagination as she drove and thought about what is, what has been, what could be, and what she - and we all - certainly does not want to be.

The 'scenes' are broken down into present day reality (the progression of Rayna's literal and metaphorical journey on the drive from Silicon Valley to Nashville and up to a short time after she arrives home), flashbacks from her past, and scenarios she imagines. I've left in the markers to show which part is which, but it feels clunky so forgive me, there just wasn't another way to do it without making it considerably longer. I hope it makes sense.

 _###_

 _"I'm lost, Deacon. There's so much coming at me all the time and it's all stuff that I ask for and it's all stuff that I want and I love but… it's just relentless. And I feel like I've given up my life to it. Everything that happened with Juliette is just reminding me that none of this lasts forever, and I wanna make the most of it. I can't do that until I remember who I am."_

 **INTERSTATE 40 - PRESENT DAY**

Rayna is driving through Albuquerque on her way back from Silicon Valley, pondering the path she has been on and who she is at this time in her life. A plane flies overhead and she feels the panic rise; she floors the accelerator and the car flexes beneath her.

Juliette's near-miss has triggered an unravelling that she's known has been coming. She feels out of control. Her life is running away with her, and she worries what will happen if she doesn't stop to think about what is real.

And yet, something about fearing death makes her feel _alive_. There is an awakening in her and it's getting stronger - she can't push it down now. Her own accident five years ago, the fallout from her mother's death, the road she's on: this is a culmination and it is demanding to be examined.

She pulls off the interstate and onto a dusty side road and comes to a stop on a quiet stretch. Her overnight bag is slung on the back seat; she reaches into it and finds her notebook, wedged next to a tattered copy of Deacon's very first album. Smiling at his youthful, handsome face on the cover, she puts the CD into the drive and pushes play, sits on the dry ground beside the car and begins to write.

 **WYATT MANSION, BELLE MEADE - 1982**

The shrill of the ringing phone wakes Rayna; it's late and no one calls the house at such an hour. She creeps out of her room and peers into the hallway downstairs. The nanny who watches her and Tandy when their father is out of town is speaking urgently into the handset and patting her chest.

"What hospital is she being taken to?" Rayna hears her ask, and she bolts down the stairs and demands to know what has happened. The nanny tells her to go back up to bed but she loudly refuses and Tandy wakes at the commotion.

"It's your mother," the nanny says, "there's been an accident."

 **RAYNA'S IMAGINATION - PRESENT DAY**

The phone rings in Rayna and Deacon's house. It's dark and quiet, everyone asleep. A groggy Deacon pads down the stairs and fumbles for the handset.

The voice on the other end is a doctor. Rayna has been in a collision - no seatbelt, a reckless driver going too fast down 2nd Avenue - and has been taken to Vanderbilt hospital. Deacon wakes Maddie and Daphne immediately and tells them what has happened, trying his best to be solid for them though he is terrified, and the three of them hurry out of the house, pulling coats on over pyjamas.

 **INTERSTATE 40 - PRESENT DAY**

Rayna is driving, humming a melody she's slowly conjuring as she explores, over several days, her mortality: the soundtrack to her own hypothetical death. The landscape changes, and she twists the radio dial until she finds a station. The song that's playing fuses into strains of Wayfaring Stranger, and then into her own melody.

She pulls into a truck stop in the dead of night and heads into an empty diner. A bored, gum-popping waitress in her late twenties strolls over to her when she sits in one of the booths. Rayna asks for a cheeseburger and a strong black coffee and lifts her head as she hands the menu back. When the waitress sees her face, her expression changes completely.

"You're Rayna Jaymes," she says, equal parts awed and confused - why would Rayna Jaymes be in her diner in the middle of nowhere?

Rayna looks at the clock: it's 3am. She smiles tiredly.

"I have all your records," the waitress, whose nametag reads _Teri D_ , tells her. She isn't paying lip service. Rayna takes off her baseball cap. "First show I ever went to was yours. You and Deacon Claybourne, you played around here when I was nine."

Rayna smiles again, and feels it this time.

Teri D sits down opposite her. "My momma died that year. My aunt drove me and my sister all the way to the city that night to see you - it was the only time we'd really gone anywhere other than school since it happened."

"I'm sorry," Rayna murmurs, "about your momma."

Teri nods briskly, accepting the condolence. "It was the first night we smiled again. I knew you'd lost your momma too, and there you were, singing these songs, only just a woman yourself, showing a girl how she could survive. I felt every word - you made me believe in my life again."

Rayna is startled by the raw sincerity. They share an unspoken understanding for a moment, before Teri shakes her head and stands, slipping Rayna's menu into her apron pocket. "Your coffee," she says, and disappears towards the kitchen. When she emerges, she puts an overflowing mug and Rayna's burger down in front of her.

"We came in this diner that night, Deacon and I," Rayna tells her, having recalled the memory. "We were staying at a little motel not far away. Never could sleep when we were on the road." She laughs fondly. "I've watched him eat more 3am cheeseburgers than I could ever count."

"And now you're married, after all this time," Teri says wistfully. Rayna nods, aching with the need to get home to Deacon, but she's not ready yet. Teri sighs. "Funny, isn't it, how life works out? Some crashes lead you to exactly where you're meant to be." She motions towards Rayna's food. "Enjoy your cheeseburger. It's on the house, Rayna Jaymes."

She walks away, Rayna staring after her, sure the reference was to her and Deacon's fateful accident, but she shivers all the same.

She drives around until she finds the old motel, entirely unchanged by the passing of time, and checks into a room for the rest of the night, her sleep restless and shallow. She is back on the road at sunrise.

 **RAYNA'S IMAGINATION - PRESENT DAY**

Flashes of her own funeral flick through her mind like an old projector slideshow: the people she loves all dressed in black, their faces tear-streaked, the mood more one of outright shock than sombre mourning.

She can see Deacon afterwards, still in a black suit, the shirt ripped open in a useless attempt to alleviate the suffocation of his grief. He is in the cabin, holding a whiskey bottle. It appears that his intention is to drink it; he picks it up and unscrews the cap, but what has happened is so very much worse than anything that would drive him to drink. Rayna's death isn't something he could even attempt to numb himself from - there is no universe in which he would conceive of succeeding.

He throws the bottle in desperate, agonised rage, a helpless man wracked with a pain that could never be borne, against the wall. It shatters, whiskey staining the wood, and a photograph of Rayna in a blue summer dress that hangs above its point of impact falls to the floor. Its glass breaks too and he picks up a piece of it. He slumps into the pool of liquid, sobbing and unable to breathe, staring at the photograph, and lifts the glass to his wrist.

 **RAYNA AND TEDDY'S APARTMENT, NASHVILLE - 1999**

Rayna cradles a month-old Maddie in a cheerful nursery while the child cries inconsolably. Her cheeks are angry-red - colic, though Rayna hadn't known it then - and nothing soothes her.

Rayna cries too, silent, lonely tears. Deacon is gone, no clue he's a father, and she is so out of her depth she feels as though her own tears may drown her. She wishes futilely that she could call her mother to ask what the hell she should do, how to calm her baby's anguish and her own.

 **RAYNA'S IMAGINATION - FUTURE**

Maddie rocks a newborn baby, clutching a shirt that belonged to Rayna. She looks utterly lost.

/

Daphne, 16 years old, about to perform her first solo show at the Bluebird. Her eyes take in the audience and linger on Deacon, Maddie, Tandy. There is an empty seat where Rayna should be.

/

Maddie, on stage in an arena, people calling her name. Cameras flash, she blinks into the glare. She's a star, she should be happy, but she doesn't feel the smile that's on her face.

/

Daphne, too young to be out in the dark, alone and scared, stands in the doorway of a closed hardware store. People walk by her and she pulls her hood up, watching their passing feet. Her phone rings; it's Deacon, and she knows he must be frantic, but she can't go home. Her mother won't be there even if she does.

 **RAYNA'S IMAGINATION - PRESENT DAY**

Deacon is in a bar, a woman sitting opposite him. She's bottle-blonde, nondescript looking, a generic kind of woman you wouldn't be able to pick out of a line-up. He tries to smile at what she's saying but his lips are too heavy. He's been trying to manufacture something that resembles a smile so he can deploy it in public in the hopes that people will stop asking him how he's doing. How he's _doing_. He never knows what he's supposed to say. The circles under his eyes are dark and his bones are stiff and still they ask.

The woman stops talking and studies his face, and he shifts uncomfortably. "You still wear your wedding ring," she helpfully points out, and he frowns, choking down the reflex to spit out that of course he does, how could anyone think he would ever take it off? ' _Til death do us part,_ that's what they'd promised each other. And then some.

He gives no answer, because he sees no point in doing so, and the woman reaches out and touches his hand. "You're so brave."

Brave. He stares at her as though she is an alien.

"She would want you to move on." It comes with a head tilt. There it is - the sympathy. He's seen a lot of that. "She would want you to be happy."

He isn't at all sure why he agreed to come out tonight. A date, they'd called it, the friends who drop by, the people who try to get him to leave his house - his and Rayna's house, he reminds them - and shave his beard and change his clothes. He has been doing, lately, partly to shut them all up so he doesn't have to listen to it. He can't take any more head tilts. He's been doing it mostly for the girls, though. They need to see him at least pretend to function - he sees the worry in their bloodshot eyes and he breaks all over again.

 _You need to remember what it's like_ , they all started to tell him only a handful of months after it happened, _you need to meet other people_. As though he'd been through a break up. As though he hadn't buried the only woman he's ever loved and casseroles covered in plastic wrap and a few blind dates will sort him out.

His voice sounds strange when he speaks, his throat dry like it is each morning when he wakes alone in their bed, scratchy from not speaking to her as he falls asleep, from the lack of wishing her a good morning. He does anyway, every day, silently, but she isn't there to reply.

"I don't know what she would want," he tells this woman sitting before him in the nice dress with the nice perfume that makes him cough when he breathes in too deeply. "We never talked about this. Why would we have? We didn't see this coming."

He knows though, that Rayna wouldn't want him to cry so painfully for her every night. He knows she wouldn't want him to wish his days away, or to fantasise about his borrowed liver packing up so he can be done playing out the brutal charade that is his life now.

"I waited for her," he says, not necessarily to the woman. "Fourteen years. She married someone else because I was a fuck up and I waited for her every damn day for fourteen years. And then she came back to me."

The sympathy quadruples and the woman pats his hand. _Pats_ it. "She can't come back to you now," she says, and he tries really hard not to send his chair flying across the room. "If she loved you as much as you say she did, she would want you to be happy again."

He laughs. It sounds jerky and mechanical. It is so absolutely absurd that anyone could even try to understand Rayna's love for him. Happy. What a foreign concept that is now.

But he knows. The depth of his loneliness is crippling and boundless and it isn't what she would want for him. If she couldn't soothe it herself, she would want someone to be here for him.

He picks up his glass and tries, against every will within him, to remember the woman's name while he lets the soda water cool the searing grief that coats his throat.

 **INTERSTATE 40 - PRESENT DAY**

Rayna grips the steering wheel as she forces herself to think of him with someone else. She pictures him kissing the woman, holding her hand, and feels acid rise in her throat. Of course she would never want him to shut himself so far away that no one could hold him when he hurts, but it burns the pit of her stomach to imagine.

She tries to think of herself being with someone else if anything happened to Deacon, and it makes her insides clench. The years with Teddy, with Luke, they were different, she and Deacon were different; it was all part of them working their way back to each other. She knew it then, she knows it now, but she feels the familiar sting of regret for the time lost, for the pain they caused each other along the way. His cancer had made her face the very real prospect of a life without him, and she'd known unquestionably that in such an eventuality there could be no one else for her. For him, though? She couldn't bear him to be in pain alone.

She thinks of Stacey. All the women he'd slept with during those years and she'd hated it, but Stacey had scared her. He'd really tried, with her. It was the first time he'd ever made a real attempt to get over Rayna. And yet.

"What's the matter?" she'd asked him, and he'd told her in one word that no one-night stand, no Stacey, no anyone, regardless of what she might want for him, could ever replace her.

A moment flashes through her mind from a night on the road long ago, her and Deacon in an anonymous hotel bed.

"I would never survive if I lost you," he'd whispered into her ear, tracing the line of her collarbone with his fingertip. "I could never blame you if you needed more than me. But it would all be worthless without you. I'd be skin and bones, not a damn thing more."

She'd kissed him and watched the way his eyes followed her lips when she pulled away to rest her head on the scratchy pillow. "You wouldn't find some other woman and forget all about me?" she'd teased, but there had been no smile on his face when he'd looked into her eyes.

"In all the lifetimes I live, Ray, there could never be any woman but you. There is no Deacon Claybourne without Rayna Jaymes."

Her face had fallen serious too and she'd dropped her voice low when she'd told him that she could never, would never, need more than him. That it had always been him, that it always would be. Some souls are bound irrevocably.

 **RAYNA'S IMAGINATION - PRESENT DAY**

Nashville, the community of musicians, a wall of photographs backstage at the Opry: Little Jimmy Dickens, Johnny Cash, George Jones. There is a photograph of her. It is wrong, out of place. It is not her time to be there.

Teri the waitress, the ticket stub from all those years ago clutched to her chest as she watches the news report: a random accident, complications from surgery.

 **INTERSTATE 40 - PRESENT DAY**

 _The song is not over,_ Rayna thinks to herself, and the solemn voice of the news reporter fades as her melody starts up again. Her notebook lays open on the passenger seat as she drives.

 **RAYNA'S IMAGINATION - MARCH 16TH 2017**

It's her first wedding anniversary with Deacon. They're at the cabin, just the two of them, the evening smoky outside as it falls. They embrace.

"Some crashes lead us to exactly where we're meant to be," he says, and backs her towards their bedroom, bumping her into the wall in the process.

The photograph of her in a blue summer dress that hangs there tumbles and he catches it while they laugh, re-hanging it hastily as she pulls him through the doorway.

 **INTERSTATE 40 - PRESENT DAY**

Rayna calls Deacon and tells him she's in Arkansas. "I miss you," she says, knowing the time has come to end this journey and begin the one she knows now is hers to begin.

"Come home, baby," he tells her. She smiles and tosses the phone onto the passenger seat. It lands next to her notebook, and the pages flick in the breeze as she drives with the top down. They are full now, lyrics scrawled across them in her handwriting.

She arrives back in Nashville a few hours later. When she walks into the house Deacon is in the kitchen alone, messing around on his guitar. He's quietly playing A Life That's Good; it's a rush of warmth that welcomes her home and is a balm to the heartbreak of the scenarios she's played out for so many miles.

Her melody runs through her head again and melts into his; they blend together until the former is washed away, and she walks up behind Deacon and joins in softly with him, smiling at his delighted surprise when he turns towards her.

 **BELLE MEADE, NASHVILLE - PRESENT DAY**

They are laying in their bed at home, Rayna on Deacon's chest. He is twirling a strand of her hair around his finger. "Do you want to do it, Deacon? Make an album with me, about us?"

He twists to face her though they are in darkness; he knows she can tell what his expression is, she knows every one of them so well. "I've wanted to make this album with you since the day I met you."

"What's holding you back?"

There is a pause. "Do you remember when I came out of rehab the second time around?" he says. "We went up to the cabin, spent a week there, away from everyone judging and _watching_." Rayna nods. She remembers, of course. Too well. "We tried to write, you thought it would help us say what we wanted to say to each other that we couldn't bring ourselves to actually _talk_ about."

It comes back to her before he says it - the bitter arguments, the tears, from both of them. The day he'd stormed out of the house and she'd found him hours later on the other side of the river.

"Yeah," she whispers.

"I want nothing more than to write with you, baby. But to write about us, our story - there is so much pain. To dig it all up, when we're finally here, in a good place - it scares me." She nods, resting her chin on his chest and looking up at him. She understands. "Why now, Ray? Why do you wanna do it now?"

She takes a deep breath while she finds the words. "I drove home from LA because I needed time to think, but I also drove because I didn't want to fly after what happened with Juliette, and then when I got on the road all I could think about was my mother, her accident, and ours - what happened, what almost happened." She lowers her hand and traces the line of his scar. Another near-miss, yet here they are. "Wheels or wings, doesn't matter - I realised it's all the same."

Deacon watches her carefully, running his hand up and down her arm.

"So I drove into it, and gave up control." She looks up at him wryly. "And you _know_ how I like to be in control." He chuckles. "But it turns out, letting go of that is exactly what helped me to find my way back home. And with you, Deacon, I've never felt in control. It terrifies me, the way you make me feel. And that's exactly why I want to write about it - that is my truth, the biggest truth of my life. I can fear death, and being lost, that all the trauma that's come before owns me, but what a waste that would be. We're so much more than that, all of us, so much more than what could hold us back if we let it, and so much more than our past traumas. But I know now that they're as much a part of us as our joys, that they're just as important - we have to learn from them, not let them kill us." She leans up on one of her elbows, looking into his eyes, feeling wildly sure of her place now. "I don't want to live forever, Deacon - I want to be truly _alive_ while I'm here. With you."

Deacon gazes at her in wonder, and shakes his head, the irony hitting him. "All these years we've lived, and the meaning of everything was right in front of us this whole time. All the pain we could have saved ourselves. And each other."

"No," Rayna breathes, '"we couldn't - because that's just it, Deacon. We would never know the truth if we didn't go through all the pain to learn to recognise it, and the value of it."

He smiles and pulls her closer, kissing her and letting his forehead rest against hers. "So let's do it. Let's write about our truth, baby. Three chords and the truth, Ray, that's all we've ever we needed anyway."

She gives him a small joyful gasp and he echoes the sentiment. If this is where her journey has led her, his smile says, he is glad for every moment she spent apart from him; they brought her back to him.

"That bus tour we talked about five years ago," he says, "I want that. I wanna do that with you."

"Oh you mean the bus tour I chickened out of?"

Deacon laughs. "You chickened out 'cause you were too afraid we'd slip. And we would've, Ray." He rolls her over, and despite the miles she's driven, despite the turmoil of the thoughts that have occupied her along the way, sleep is the furthest thing from her mind. "We were always going to slip," he kisses her to punctuate each word, "right... back... to this."

 **THE BLUEBIRD CAFE - A NOT TOO DISTANT FUTURE**

Rayna and Deacon on the small, familiar stage, singing one of the songs from their album, the audience captivated.

 _This_ is Rayna Jaymes. They don't take their eyes from her: she is a legend, someone with something to say. The show at Silicon Valley with no one paying attention was a misstep, an aberration - a wake up call to tell her she was travelling down the wrong road, one that would only have led to the wrong kind of crash.

She turns to Deacon and slips her hand into his, where it belongs, and where it will stay as they grow old together.


End file.
